Now my question is... does this mean we lose the benefit of that URL being liked in terms of SEO benefits? Basically because that is not the canonical URL which is now proudly sitting on the wall, it is a variation of the actual URL i am trying to optimize. Also will it cause duplication issues, because its almost like its presenting my website content on a different URL.

Is it because for example if somewhere shares your website on their Facebook news feed, Googlebot can crawl these news feeds and if it sees someone has shared your website, it thinks this site must be worth sharing and hence it acts as a positive point towards your website?

if the above is true, it almost sounds like the way links count towards your ranking.

I've read up on this, and the new Like button has replaced the old Share button, they are essentially the same thing because when you click the like button it shares it on your wall anyway. When you go to the facebook development page there isn't an option to add a Share button anymore. Facebook has also confirmed they are no longer developing the share button and the like buttons is where they are focusing their efforts.

For all for all intents and purposes the facebook like and old share button are one of the same thing.

With that cleared up, can anyway shed any light on the original question, i.e. with the tracking code will that effect the benefit (for arguments sake lets even get the facebook thing, what if that was a link on a normal website and wasnt no follow, would google know that was tracking code or would it think that was me website link?)

In a nutshell, the conclusion from that thread was that facebook "likes" contribute to your ranking position in a similar way to a normal website back link would.

thank you for turning this thread into somewhat of a hair splitting thread, rather than continue to do so, perhaps someone else who isn't simple trying to score points could actually shed any light on the SEO issue in question here.

Theoretically, if the link were to count as part of the link popularity algorithm, then it would count towards the URL that the person would get to when they got there. If the URL has parameters in it, you could tell Google via your GWMT account to ignore those parameters.